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(This post is a resource for home and small-business users with questions about the impending end-of-life for Windows XP. Larger enterprise users have some different options available to them; contact us to discuss your situation and options.)

For those who haven’t seen it in the news yet: Microsoft will be ending support for its hugely successful operating system, Windows XP, on April 8th. This means that users of the 12-year-old operating system will no longer be able to get updates, and in particular will not be able to get security updates. Users of more modern versions of Windows, such as Windows Vista or Windows 7 will remain supported for several more years.

Once support ends, computers still on Windows XP will become a very juicy target for Internet criminals and attackers. Internet crime is big business, so every day there are criminals looking for new weaknesses in computer systems (called vulnerabilities), and developing attacks to take advantage of them (these attacks are called exploits). Normally, the software vendor (Microsoft in this case) quickly finds out about these weaknesses and releases updates to fix them. When an exploit is developed, some number of people fall victim shortly after the exploit is first used, but people who get the update in a relatively timely manner are protected.

But what happens when a vendor stops updating the software? All of a sudden, the bad guys can use these same attacks, the same exploits, indefinitely. As a product nears end of life, attackers have an incentive to hold off on using critical vulnerabilities until the deadline passes. The value of their exploits goes up significantly once they have confidence that the vendor will never patch it. Based on that, we can expect a period of relative quiet in terms of announced vulnerabilities affecting XP from now until shortly after the deadline, when we will likely see stockpiled critical vulnerabilities begin circulating. From then on, the risk of these legacy XP systems will continue to increase, so migrating away from XP or dramatically isolating the systems should be a priority for people or organizations that still use them.

How do I know if I’m running Windows XP?

If your computer is more than 5 years old, odds are it is running Windows XP

Simplest way: “Win+Break”: Press and hold down the Windows key on your keyboard, then find the “Pause” or “Break” key and press it. Let both keys go. That will show the System Properties windows. You may have to hunt around for your “Pause/Break” key, but hey, it finally has a use.

Alternate way: Click the Start Menu -> Right click on “My Computer” -> On the menu that comes out, click on Properties

Your version of Windows will be the first thing on the System Properties window.

How do I stay safe?

Really, you should think about buying a new computer. You can think of it as a once a decade spring cleaning. If your computer is old enough to have Windows XP, having an unsupported OS is likely just one of several problems. It is possible to upgrade your old computer to a newer operating system such as Windows 7, or convert to a free Linux-based operating system, but this may be a more complicated undertaking than many users want to tackle.

Any computer you buy these days will be a huge step up from a 7-year old (at least!) machine running XP, so you can comfortably shop the cheapest lines of computers. New computers can be found for $300, and it’s also possible to buy reputable refurbished ones with a modern operating system for $100-$200.

For those who really don’t want to or can’t upgrade, the situation isn’t pretty. Your computer will continue to work as it always has, but the security of your system and your data is entirely in your hands. These systems have been low-hanging fruit for attackers for a long time, but after April 8th they will have a giant neon bull’s-eye on them.

There are a few things you can do to reduce your risks, but there really is no substitute for timely vendor patches.

Only use the system for tasks that can’t be done elsewhere. If the reason for keeping an XP machine is to run some specific program or piece of hardware, then use it only for that. In particular, avoid web browsing and email on the unsupported machine: both activities expose the vulnerable system to lots of untrusted input.

Keep all of your other software up to date. Install and use the latest version of Firefox or Chrome web browsers, which won’t be affected by Microsoft’s end of life.

Back up your computer. There are many online backup services available for less than $5 a month. If something goes wrong, you want to make sure that your data is safe. Good online backup services provide a “set it and forget it” peace of mind. This is probably the single most important thing you can do, and should be a priority even for folks using a supported operating system. Backblaze, CrashPlan, and SpiderOak are all reasonable choices for home users.

Run antivirus software, and keep it up to date. AVAST, AVG, and Bitdefender are all reasonable free options but be aware that antivirus is only a layer of protection: it’s not perfect.

The people that run The Internet have been clamoring for years for increased adoption of IPv6, the next generation Internet Protocol. Modern operating systems, such as Windows 8 and Mac OS X, come out of the box ready and willing to use IPv6, but most networks still have only IPv4. This is a problem because the administrators of those networks may not be expecting any IPv6 activity and only have IPv4 monitoring and defenses in place.

In 2011, Alec Waters wrote a guide on how to take advantage of the fact that Windows Vista and Windows 7 were ‘out of the box’ configured to support IPv6. Dubbed the “SLAAC Attack”, his guide described how to set up a host that advertised itself as an IPv6 router, so that Windows clients would prefer to send their requests to this IPv6 host router first, which would then resend the requests along to the legitimate IPv4 router on their behalf.

This past winter, we at Neohapsis Labs tried to recreate the SLAAC Attack to test it against Windows 8 and make it easy to deploy during our own penetration tests.

We came up with a set of standard packages and accompanying configuration files that worked, then created a script to automate this process, which we call “Sudden Six.” It can quickly create an IPv6 overlay network and the intermediate translation to IPv4 with little more than a base Ubuntu Linux or Kali Linux installation, an available IPv4 address on the target network, and about a minute or so to download and install the packages.

Windows 8 on Sudden Six

As with the SLAAC Attack described by Waters, this works against networks that only have IPv4 connectivity and do not have IPv6 infrastructure and defenses deployed. The attack establishes a transparent IPv6 network on top of the IPv4 infrastructure. Attackers may take advantage of Operating Systems that prefer IPv6 traffic to force those hosts to route their traffic over our IPv6 infrastructure so they can intercept and modify that communication.

To boil it down, attackers can conceivably (and fairly easily) weaponize an attack on our systems simply by leveraging this vulnerability. They could pretend to be an IPv6 router on your network and see all your web traffic, including data being sent to and from your machine. Even more lethal, the attacker could modify web pages to launch client-side attacks, meaning they could create fake websites that look like the ones you are trying to access, but send all data you enter back to the attacker (such as your username and password or credit card number).

As an example, we can imagine this type of attack being used to snoop on web traffic from employees browsing web sites. Even more lethal, the attackers could modify web pages to launch client-side attacks.

The most extreme way to mitigate the attack is to disable IPv6 on client machines. In Windows, this can be accomplished manually in each Network Adapter Properties panel or with GPO. Unfortunately, this would hinder IPv6 adoption. Instead, we would like to see more IPv6 networks being deployed, along with the defenses described in RFC 6105 and the Cisco First Hop Security Implementation Guide. This includes using features such as RA Guard, which allows administrators to configure a trusted switch port that will accept IPv6 Router Advertisement packets, indicating the legitimate IPv6 router.

At DEF CON 21, Brent Bandelgar and Scott Behrens will be presenting this attack as well as recommendations on how to protect your environment. You can find a more detailed abstract of our talk here. The talk will be held during Track 2 on Friday at 2 pm. In addition, on Friday we will be releasing the tool on the Neohapsis Github page.